But next week, Fiehler plans to pull a much bigger trick out of his sleeve: The STL Index, a new, real-time list gauging "online influence level" for every twitter account in the region.

We're not just talking about rankings, although there will indeed be that. We're talking about an in-depth profile page for each of the 250,000 or so St. Louisans actively using twitter -- detailing who they're talking to, who's talking to them, what links they're sharing and who's retweeting their bon mots.

As Fiehler admits, Twitter can be maddening to new users, and its power difficult to harness for businesses. "We're trying to make sense of all this stuff," he explains to Daily RFT. "It's such a big amorphous blob...We want to organize the chaos that's out there."The unveiling of the STL Index will be the highlight of The State of Online Influence: Social Reach in St. Louis, an event Infuz is hosting next Thursday, April 28, beginning at 3:30 p.m. in Soulard Preservation Hall.

But it's far from the only thrill Infuz is promising. Keynote speakers Matt Ridings (@TechGuerilla) and Tom Webster (@Webby2001) will discuss the "impact of influence both online and offline." And a panel of "St. Louis' most influential people" will include one person who manages to have a ton of influence in both arenas -- Mayor Francis Slay, also known as @mayorslay.

For all of the mayor's enthusiasm for Twitter (yep, he actually made an appearance at RFT's Web Awards!), Fiehler knows that Slay was a pretty big "get."

"The mayor was one person we worked from multiple angles," he says. "He's not just influential online, but extraordinarily influential offline, too ... We did work on him for quite some time. But I think he's excited about coming."

As for Fiehler and his staff, they're also excited, but that's currently mixed with nervous apprehension. Thanks to the recent nationwide outage of Amazon's cloud hosting service -- which hosts both Infuz's year-and-a-half-old STL Tweets and the new STL Index -- both services have been down. Infuz is in the process of switching from Amazon to locally-owned Contegix, but it's still led to some anxious hours.

And then, of course, there's the fact that for every Twitter user who's thrilled to be at the top of the new STL Index, there are going to be more than 200,000 users who are nowhere near the top. Fiehler admits that he's ready for some blowback: "Some of the people that we've given peeks of it to have been horrified."

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Sarah - Thanks for the great article. We really appreciate you helping spread the word! One note, the event is filling up quickly, so people shouldn't wait to RSVP if they're interested in attending. Thanks again!

Thanks for the write up Sarah, we're really excited about the event. Influence is such a fickle thing, we're hoping that by putting some framework and context around it we can move the conversation forward a few steps. If we accomplish nothing more than that we'll consider the event a success.